Chemical Equilibration and Transport Properties of Hadronic Matter near image Original Research Article

We discuss how the inclusion of Hagedorn states near Tc leads to short chemical equilibration times of proton anti-proton pairs, View the MathML source pairs, and View the MathML source pairs, which indicates that hadrons do not need to be “born” into chemical equilibrium in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. We show that the hadron ratios computed within our model match the experimental results at RHIC very well. Furthermore, estimates for η/s near Tc computed within our resonance gas model are comparable to the string theory viscosity bound η/s=1/4π. Our model provides a good description of the recent lattice results for the trace anomaly close to View the MathML source.